Palantir Acquires App-Making Startup Propeller

In its second announced deal this week, Palantir Technologies has acquired Propeller, a startup offering tools for building native mobile apps.

Two acquisitions in one week seems pretty ambitious for any company, but as noted in Fortune, it’s particularly unusual for Palantir, a data analysis company that has only made one other acquisition, email startup VoiceGem (or at least, that’s the only other one that’s been announced publicly).

Last year, Propeller raised $1.25 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, ffAngel, and, in the words of my boss Alexia Tsotsis, “everyone good basically.” One big connection with Palantir: Peter Thiel is both a co-founder at Palantir and a partner at Founders Fund (ffAngel is the firm’s seed investment arm).

The announcement on the Propeller website doesn’t offer many details about the acquisition, but it sounds like the deal was more on the team than the technology or product:

We have great respect for the people and the work accomplished at Palantir, and getting to know them over the past few months made it clear just how well our teams are aligned. Having tackled many technical challenges facing mobile app creation, we’re eager to solve important problems at Palantir on a global scale.

As I alluded to above, Palantir announced earlier this week that it had acquired social polling and analytics startup Poptip.